81–90 of 143 posts
Doesn't that just have the effect that everyone now has to pay for scientific articles? I mean, as a scientist, this benefits me, but I can see why your average Joe wouldn't be happy to pay taxes so he can read articles he can't understand...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you'd be amazed how small most of the scientific communities in certain areas of research are. If you have the names of a few well-known researchers on the editorial board or in the list of reviewers of an open-access/electronic journal, this will instanty establish its credentials and authority. After all, researchers care mostly about the quality of the work and the results, and not so much about the brandi…
Has this not been true for a long time though? Why haven't new upstart publishers thrown the larger ones out already?
Another factor may be that most research (at least in CS) gets presented at conferences, gets published in conference proceedings first, and then journal publications are mostly an afterthought, and in many cases are skipped entirely. Organizing a conference with open-access proceedings may not be as cheap and easy as setting up a web-site and getting a few well-known names to serve as reviewers...
Although I did not contribute to anything of this, it makes me a proud European. :) I wonder if the US will follow suits when/if this happens. Any thoughts? --- Edit: maybe it would be better to link to the original source instead [ http://futurism.com/eu-announces-that-all-european-scientifi... ].
Thanks, we've updated the link from http://www.sciencealert.com/europe-announces-that-all-scient... , which points to this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a little elitist of you. There are lots of people outside academia who can understand and benefit from academic publications. Consider, for example, somebody thinking of creating a startup doing research on what the bleeding edge of a field is. Or a former student considering re-entering academic research checking up on how the field has progressed since they left it. Or simply an independent researcher trying…
Not to mention the many average Joes who have already done some important work by reading open access papers in fields simply because they suddenly find causes to became motivated to go past the average Joe level. http://matt.might.net/articles/my-sons-killer/
Here is another link from his blog: http://matt.might.net/articles/tenure/
And under the section called "A regret: Not pushing for open-access" he says:
"My hope is that tenure will provide me opportunities to steadily shift computer science and medicine toward high-quality, high-impact open access venues.
The reason I feel especially ashamed over my behavior is that in the course of my research for my son, I have used my privilege as an academic to punch through paywalls with impunity to reach medical papers.
In a damning irony, even this paper is behind a paywall.
I realize that few patients or parents have the ability to do what I did, and they never will, until all of academic medicine goes open access.
In computer science, academic paywalls stifle.
In medicine, academic paywalls kill."
I suppose the main point still stands.
I sometimes wonder if companies like Elsevier are the patent trolls of the research publishing industry - with the same chilling effect on the spread of innovation. [1] It will be interesting to see how this affects the quality of reviewing. I think the defendants of the current system (who usually say someone has to bear the cost of the review process) are going to be rudely surprised when the academic community emb…
Launching a new journal is a non-trivial process, you have to convince people to publish in it, you have to convince peer reviewers that it's worth their effort, etc. You have to have a marketing and sales teams that gets it into the hands and minds of researchers/libraries/etc. Then follows several decades of brand building before you make any real money. Many journals don't make it and die and publishers have to swallow the losses.
In practice OA has other solutions (author pays) to fund this, but it's far from a free lunch.
Edit: a few of the links on the wiki page still link to it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub
They also have a Facebook page and an onion route.
That's incredibly stupid. The publishing of scientific papers has a cost, in terms of editorial service, proofreading, typesetting. This cost will be paid by scientists, rather than by the readers. In other words, the papers will be free to read, but won't be free to publish. I know as a fact that smaller research groups struggle to pay current publishing fees, and as a matter of fact the EU decision will increase th…
Have you actually published an article ? Publishers now don't even do editorial service. They give you a template you must follow and the actual (free) reviewers tell you if you write good english or not.
Whenever I published an article most often I got my references corrected, some grammar errors where spotted during the publishing process (I am not a native English speaker), also my articles are professionally typeset.
Maybe we work in different fields, don't assume your point of view automatically extends to every field of science.
This should be effective today, while giving a few month grace period at most.